"Can AI Art Be Copyrighted? It has long been the posture of the U.S. Copyright Office that there is no copyright protection for works created by non-humans, including machines. Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted."
> Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted
Is that last bit from the Copyright Office, or is it the author's interpretation? Because I could just as easily imagine the battle being over who or what was the actual creator of the content (i.e. is it a derivative work), rather than whether the thing the machine created is eligible for copyright.
To remove the AI from the equation for a second, imagine that I took four images of living artists' work, placed them in a 2x2 grid, and called that a new artwork. There are two seperate questions to consider: (1) have I infringed upon the original authors' copyrights, and (2) is the new thing I have created eligible for copyright.
The stance that there is "no copyright protection for works created by non-humans" only addresses the second question, not the first question of how it interacts with existing copyrights.
If you make art combining generative AI with manual work, you get copyright over the exact portions of a work you made yourself. You have to indicate which parts. The parts generated by AI are not copyrightable.
Further reading seems to indicate human control is pivotal in the equation. A human can be granted copyright for created works but the creative part must be human and not machine.
Just like you don't grant copyright on a PDF to Adobe Photoshop... you grant it to the human who guided the program. Photoshop is a tool and the human is the creator.
> "For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology – not the human user.
> "Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist – they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output."
> "The USCO will consider content created using AI if a human author has crafted something beyond the machine's direct output. A digital artwork that was formed from a prompt, and then edited further using Photoshop, for example, is more likely to be accepted by the office. The initial image created using AI would not be copyrightable, but the final product produced by the artist might be."
Wait, so the US copyright office considers the AI model to be the sole creator of the work? So the prompt - the actual intent behind the use of the tool - is irrelevant?
Then where is the line? If I use a painting program that runs a Math.random() on a brush and I use this brush to draw something then is that also created by a non-human?
If I program a robot arm to draw a picture then is that picture also created by a non-human? What if I use a printer?
I read it that a program/computer/robot cannot hold copyright. If someone uses AI to generate art, the AI doesn't hold the copyright. (Notice it doesn't say anything about the user.) Likewise, if Photoshop is used to create art, Photoshop doesn't hold the copyright.
The program for the robot you could copyright. The picture you could not.
Let's be realistic here: there is no oracle indicating something was generated by AI. Most graphic artists have been using partially machine generated work from tools like Photoshop for a decade or more. They just don't mention it.
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-copyright
"Can AI Art Be Copyrighted? It has long been the posture of the U.S. Copyright Office that there is no copyright protection for works created by non-humans, including machines. Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted."